Three decades ago, the idea of empowerment was fresh and daring. As young as the word itself, we both felt that empowerment would be at the heart of our life’s work. In our earliest days together, sitting with yellow legal pads at our kitchen table overlooking the Ashokan reservoir and the Catskill mountains, we planned our wedding ceremony and then seamlessly turned to designing our fledgling Empowerment Workshop. So intertwined was our love with our passion for this work, that ten days after we were married, we launched our first workshop. As we celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary, our bond of love is stronger than ever and our passion for empowerment more compelling than ever.
All those years ago, neither we, nor the world, knew what empowerment really meant. We knew it was about helping people to grow and realize their full potential. We also knew that it was about more than just healing and fixing problems. But what exactly was its purpose? Why was this idea entering the lexicon of change strategies with such force? Over these three decades, an extraordinarily diverse, visionary, and committed community of people was attracted to our training programs to help us discover the answers to these questions.
They came to learn for themselves, their families, their communities, their organizations, and their causes. They came from all over North America, Europe, and Latin America, but also from Afghanistan, Darfur, Rwanda, South Africa, China, Russia, and India. They included social entrepreneurs, community organizers, and environmentalists; Fortune 500 corporate leaders, organizational change consultants, and business school professors; life coaches, health-care professionals, therapists, educators, and clergy; nonprofit managers, government executives, and politicians; young and old, male and female, and embodying every race and ethnicity. In short, they represented the full diversity of our planet.
They became a global empowerment laboratory, helping us both refine our empowerment methodology and showing us the breadth for its application in society. The heart of our learning was distilled into one line: Personal empowerment is the foundation of societal transformation. If we wish to change our community, our organization, or the world, we must begin by changing ourselves. And the key to changing ourselves is being willing to dream a different possibility for our lives, and learning how to bring that dream to fruition. That is the essence of this book and the empowerment journey upon which you are embarking.
As you take this journey and dare to dream new possibilities for your life, know that you are also participating in a global empowerment movement—a movement that aspires to nothing less than changing the world one person and one dream at a time. And as you receive the torch passed from the many who have helped light the way before you, we hope you will do the same for others. We pass you the torch and wish you well.
David Gershon
Gail Straub